There Is Nothing To Fear
by footshooter
Summary: ...Other Than Fear Itself. My take on Jonathan's making and rise to power. T for swearing, mentions of violence and dark imagery. And coz I can't bring myself to K plus.


**A/N: ****My take on how Johnny-boy mighta started to synthesize his special compound. I've tried to be factually accurate and all that (pharmacy student) but it's late and I can't keep up being brilliant all the time. Heh. Plus, it's not real, and I can mess with reality if I want to! Thanks in advance if you bother to read and/or sign your name. Now I really need to go to fucking bed. It's half 1 in the bloody morning /facepalm.**

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><p>Dr Jonathan Crane was a psycho-pharmacologist. That meant that he had the knowledge of the brain that a psychologist had, and yet the knowledge of drug actions of a pharmacist. He's specialised in pharmacology in his PhD after spending copious amounts of the time he spent on his own reading about chemistry, drugs, and their mechanism of action.<p>

Currently, he was sat in his front room of his flat (just beyond the narrows, of course, his job at Arkham had _some _perks, the money being one of them) scratching reaction mechanisms and compound structures into a bound book he kept his notes in. There were plenty of scribbles, anything crossed out was omitted with a single line so that his research was complete, detailed and incredibly neat.

It contained notes about metabolism, excretion, effects, and all of the different compounds that he'd developed and tested upon himself. But still, nothing had worked.

He knew he needed a lipophilic group to pass the blood-brain barrier. He knew he needed something similar to serotonin to inhibit those pathways. Or maybe he was looking down the wrong route.

Maybe he needed something to block the serotonin from binding, something to change the structure of it, to stop it's effects from being transmitted, to omit the feeling of well-being an happiness to such an extent that the subject didn't just feel depressed, but felt scared too. But not so much that he affected his digestive system. He wasn't fussed so much about the… victims of his experiments, but more that he usually tested things on himself. And he didn't want to eliminate the serotonin in the digestive tract so much that he couldn't shit for a few days.

He scratched out the formula and some properties of serotonin (C10H12N2O, Mr of 176.215gmol-1, slightly soluble in water). Two aromatic rings, one 6-membered with an alcohol (phenol), one 5-membered, with a nitrogen (pyrrole), both unsaturated. Attached to the pyrolle on the third position was a tertiary amine – two carbons before it joined, aka ethylamine. Not a complicated molecule. Not in the slightest. Released into neuronal spaces, the molecule activates 5-HT receptors on the dendrites, cell bodies and pre-synaptic terminals of neurones adjacent to that, continuing on throughout the brain. Mono-amine transporters could inhibit the reuptake by the receptors, and drugs like selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitors can produce anti-depressant effects by leaving serotonin in the spaces ready to trigger the receptors again and making people happier.

So really, all he had to do was modify it so that he had something similar which could rapidly block the 5-HT receptors, stopping the positive mood effects and leading to spiralling depression and fear.

Because that's what he wanted to see most. That's what fascinated him. Fear. Always had and always would, until he got to the bottom of it. Until he could control it by not only being unafraid, but also being able to spark it in other people.

See, he'd never been an imposing kinda guy. He was five foot nine with a lanky sort of build and his big blue eyes just helped to make him look ridiculously, well, innocent. The kind of eyes women swooned over (they wouldn't get into his bed though, those fucking slags from the hockey team who were desperate to be his friend but nothing else).

It wasn't like he couldn't fight. Not at all. In fact, he was fairly fucking good at it. He'd taken lessons after a particularly nasty run in with a guy who called him a nerd and proceeded to beat him to a pulp. The guy only stopped when his girlfriend shouted at him, and then went on to pityingly try and tidy him up. He'd walked away from her (and probably his sympathy for the human race) from that moment, and the next time he'd been cornered in the changing rooms after being forced to do sport when he really wanted to do extra-curricular chemistry, he'd fought back and knocked the guy on his arse.

People kept their distance from then on, but that was okay. He liked his own company.

Not that he was ever on his own. He _always _had company.

Jonathan frowned at the simplicity of this line of thought. Surely inhibiting serotonin to such an extent, if it worked, would have been picked up on before. Surely someone would have come up with the idea he had.

But he had nothing else to go by, so he decided to try it.

In college he had decided to study psychology, mainly because he'd become obsessed with the fear he struck into the people in school who'd skirted round corridors and called him a weirdo. Scarecrow helped with that, muttering away in the back of his mind and telling him all of the things that would make those boys _scream_. Jonathan smiled at the thought, and someone spat at him, calling him a freak.

Everything went blank after that until he was sitting outside the principal's office and the kid was being carried out on a stretcher. The principal had always been kind to him, and was shocked to hear of the violence he'd inflicted on another pupil of his school.

So Jonathan turned on the puppy eyes and started to cry. He didn't _mean _to, they'd just pushed him so far to the edge. He'd self harmed (lucky couple of scars on his wrists), thought of suicide even because he didn't think he could take it anymore. It was the last line of self-defence before he was well and truly broken.

The other boy got expelled from school, rather than him, the rest put in detention for the rest of the year. When the principal fell for his lies, he had to suppress his grin, stop Scarecrow from being seen in his eyes, beaming out, cackling.

They didn't bother him again.

In fact, they gave him a wide birth from then on. And he could _smell_ the fear, he could _taste_ it. It was incredible and intoxicating and so _right_.

It was beautiful. Scarecrow had shown him that. And so, he needed to get more victims. And where better than in the field of psychology where he could put down his obsession and addiction to something more rational, more normal. All of the worst things have been done in the interests of science, after all.

So he got to work, and weeks later he'd come up with something that just might be… right.

He took a syringe and plunged it through into his vein, the quickest way to get it into his system without further development. And then he waited, Scarecrow hovering in the background like some sort of demented dark angel, wanting to protect, but also to harm.

After 15 minutes Jonathan decided that it wasn't working, that he'd clearly done something wrong again because he was just so_stupid_. He always had been. Something wrong. Something that shouldn't have been allowed to live. The kids at school were trying to do him a favour when they beat him up. Trying to rid the world of a useless, waste of…

_JONATHAN!_

Scarecrow's voice cut through his mind and knocked him out of that particular train of thought.

_Well, you've managed to do _something_ even if it isn't what we want…_

The room had changed. Jonathan didn't know how, but it had. And someone was watching him. From every corner of the room they were watching him. He rushed to the windows and drew the curtains, looking for the cameras, looking for where they could be hiding.

Scarecrow laughed,

_Johnny, you're getting paranoid. Just sit down, and calm down._

Jonathan allowed Scarecrow to manoeuvre them to the sofa and sat down, trying his best not to look around because if he did he'd see somewhere else that someone could be coming from, where someone could be hiding, or surveying. He tried to calm his breathing so that he didn't begin to panic.

It didn't work.

He saw something moving behind the curtains through the gloom, illuminated by the streetlamps outside. He closed his eyes so he didn't have to look but the world was tipping inside his head and it made him feel queasy to do so, so he had to reopen them. He tried not to glance at the window, but he failed.

Crows were forming from the material of the curtains, flapping their wings and cawing while staring at him with their blood red eyes.

"No," he muttered, scuttling back and falling on to the floor.

The table was walking towards him, hemming him in with the sofa and the crows were spitting blood from their beaks as though they had just been feeding on people. And he was next. He could hear it in their calls.

They were calling for an army.

The walls started dripping slime, and moving, tossing this way and that and making him feel sick. The curtains were still spawning crows and they were walking towards him, baying for his blood.

His heart was beating over 90 beats per minute, he was hyperventilating and he was about to pass out. But as soon as he lost consciousness they'd have him too, they'd peck out his guts and eat his eyes until there was nothing left but a skeleton and a room full of big, black birds with fiery eyes.

The first crow hopped into the air and started to flap it's wings, flying towards Jonathan and he realised how big it was, and how terrifying it was.

"No!"

He fell to the floor and that was it. The carpet had grown ropes, and was binding him down so he was helpless and he could _feel_the beating of the wings on his face and his body, the airflow, the blood dripping onto his face from the crows' beaks. He wanted to scream.

_JONATHAN!_

He closed his eyes but felt sick again.

_Jonathan, why do you think I was sent to protect you? I'm a scarecrow. I can make them go away. All you have to do is believe in me._

Jonathan would cling on to the last hope he had, and so envisioned Scarecrow until he literally climbed out of his head and shambled off, the crows taking flight and re-entering the curtain. The walls stopped dripping and the carpet let him go, the tremors he had been experiencing dying out to nothing.

He blinked, and Scarecrow had gone too. Everything was how it was.

He sat up against a counter and tried to control his breathing, slow down his heart rate. The tremors of the flat he put down to the fact that he was shaking. The blood on his face, well, that was a mixture of sweat and tears, his arms and legs went rigid from the shock, the fear he was feeling transforming into greater detail so he couldn't escape. And the crows? He'd always hated crows. His psychology degree had taught him that people manifest other personalities to protect them from something, or so that they could be free from whatever restraints they had put into place on them.

But Scarecrow didn't fall into that because he was real.

He'd just saved Jonathan's life.

"Thank you."

_That's okay, brother. You did it! You made it!_

"I… Yes. I did. I just need to convert it to an aerosol now and we can, well, do anything we want."

_All the fear I want!_

"Exactly."

_We need to conquer your fear first, though Jonathan. Because that won't help you if you accidently expose yourself. We need to be completely in control. Remember what I told you all those years ago; the only thing you have to fear…_

"Is fear itself… I know. I have more tests to do so… I'm sure I'll build up a resistance eventually."

He hoped he would, anyway.

_You will, Johnny_, Scarecrow spoke in a soothing tone, the same one he had used when the hallucinations hit.

To an outsider, it would appear Jonathan was having a conversation with himself responding to words that weren't being said. An outsider would label him with schizophrenia, or, to be more accurate, multiple personality disorder. People never remembered they were two separate conditions and it really bugged him.

But he didn't have either of those conditions, and anyone who said he did was a fool and quick to judge. That's why Scarecrow hid, in public. So they weren't sectioned.

And now he had means to inhale fear from the whole of Gotham city. He'd use the nuts in Arkham for practice, and then find a way of releasing it city-wide. And everyone would scream, and everyone would cry as monsters shot out of the darkness and tried to rip them apart. He'd know the greatest fears of everyone in the city.

And that would be beautiful.


End file.
